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Chatto & Windus to publish Lauren Elkin's debut
Chatto and Windus has snapped up world all-language rights to Lauren Elkin’s debut novel Scaffolding.
The book was acquired by Clara Farmer, publishing director at Chatto & Windus, and has been edited by Kaiya Shang, commissioning editor. It will publish on 13th June.
Scaffolding follows two couples navigating desire and loss in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost 50 years apart. Chatto said it is about “the bonds we create with people, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we’ve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who’ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there".
Rights have already been snapped up by Farrar, Straus & Giroux for North America and HarperCollins for Germany.
The synopsis says: “In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London so she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clémentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood.”
Shang said: “Scaffolding is an ingenious novel that weaves together themes that will also appeal to those lucky enough to be familiar with Lauren’s non-fiction writing. In prose that is at once elegant and playful, Lauren has crafted a profound meditation on desire suffused with art, cinema, literature, music and Lacanian psychoanalysis – and a feminist collective called les colleuses.”
Elkin added: “I am so glad this novel I’ve been furtively writing since 2007 is finally going to see the light of day, and I’m honoured for it to join the fiction list at Chatto & Windus. This book has seen me through many stages of my life, and it’s a real pleasure to send it out into the world.”
Elkin is the author of several books, including Flâneuse: Women Walk the City (also Chatto). Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles and Frieze, among others. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir’s previously unpublished novel The Inseparables.
